5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
fantastic fantasy, November 2, 2005
This review is from: The Silver Lake (The Warriors of Estavia) (Hardcover)
The God-Wall protects the city of Anavatan, the Silver Lake known as Gol-Beyaz where the six Gods live, and twelve outlying villages. The power and richness of the city is a magnet to the barbarian tribes like the Yuruk who each year unsuccessfully try to breach the wall. The spirits (essences of prophecy) want form and to have that they need to drine from the lake and eat the people unsworn to any God; neither the tribes nor the spirits have managed to breach the wall except this year during theevent known as Havo's Dance.
During the second night of the event, the spirits attack teens Brax, his younger friend Spar, and the malevolent Graize. Brax calls on the God of Battle Estavia for help and she makes him and Spar her own. Graize wakes up spirit filled in the plains where he meets up with a Yuruk tribe who takes him in and prophecies that this year they will be able to breach the God walls because the spirits who want substance will help him. Brax becomes Estavia's champion and is destined to meet Graize in battle, while Spar is trying to find a place for himself without giving in to a seer that speaks to him telepathically and wants to use him in his plans for conquest.
The first book in The Warriors of Estavia is a fantastic fantasy filled with action, intrigue and refreshingly original and realistic characters. The bond between Brax and Spar is beautiful to behold and the pair change over the cycle of the book in a realistic manner as they are shown love combined with discipline. An expert world builder, Fiona Patton actually has her audience believing in Gods who commonly manifest themselves to their people in a physical form.
Harriet Klausner
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
faltering, February 24, 2009
It took me weeks to finish this off: I just kept on saying "I'll finish it another time" which though completely irrational a behaviour does not exactly argue for the value of this book.
And yet there are so many things to be liked.
This new serial by Ms Patton is explicitly set in an Instambul-like town surrounded by foes who closely resemble Greeks, Slavs and (turkish?) nomadic tribes. Even the book cover and dedication confirm this.
Instead of the expected Islam-like religion (and despite ever present towers strongly resembling minarets) the author prefers to introduce sort of an animistic one, administrated by shamans (called wyrdin, seers and many other names) who try to control an immense variety of spirits of unknown origin for a variety of reasons, including theft, warfare and religious fanatism.
Six of these spirits have infact touched the waters of the lake, an immense reservoir of mystical power, becoming actual, powerful (but not allmighty) gods.
One may also add that Ms Patton has developped further some ideas about society previously found in her Branion series.
In this new world of hers there are men, women and bigenders (these last sometimes able to shift from one extreme to the other of their sexuality, seemingly at will), all perfectly equal and equally strong (two of the six gods are bigender).
If gender is irrelevant, sexual orientation is a non issue (two important side character, Kemal and Yashar, are well respected soldiers and are in a passionate long term relationship without anyone having anything to say about it, not even their female goddess).
Our traditional roles are deliberately annihilated: as in the Branion series honorifics are grammatically invariable and the two goddesses are therefore called "god".
Ms Patton goes further though: if family is the basic cell of this society too, the twist is that the gender of the couple is irrelevant, that there might be no couple at all but just one person, that children love as "parent(s)" the person(s) who take(s) care of them and may be unrelated to them by blood.
All the above is very interesting and refreshing, the writing is to the point and proficient, the plot is well developped (some minor inconsistencies as well as a couple of typos are probably due to the editor), the characters are potentially interesting and yet all this never comes to life.
I was always left cold, the characters likeable but never really alive and I never could relate to them.
Possibly all this mumbling about prophecies, alternative futures, all these vague plot threads to be tied did not help me to get involved: quite a basic flaw in any fantasy novel.
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